A false ridicule has settled upon Novels, and upon Young Ladies as the readers of novels. Love, we are told authoritatively, has not that importance in the actual practice of life--nor that extensive influence upon human affairs--which novel-writers postulate, and which the interest of novels presumes. Something to this effect has been said by an eminent writer; and the law is generally laid down upon these principles by cynical old men, and envious blue-stockings who have outlived their personal attractions. The sentiment however is false even for the present condition of society; and it will become continually _more_ false as society improves. For what is the great commanding event, the one sole revolution, in a woman's life? Marriage. Viewing her course from the cradle to the grave in the light of a drama, I am entitled to say that her wedding-day is its catastrophe--or, in technical language, its _peripeteia_: whatever else is important to her in succeeding years has its origin in that event. So much for _that_ sex. For the other, it is admitted that Love is not, in the same exclusive sense, the governing principle under which their lives move: but what then are the concurrent forces, which sometimes happen to cooeperate with that agency--but more frequently disturb it? They are two; Ambition, and Avarice. Now for the vast majority of men--Ambition, or the passion for personal distinction, has too narrow a stage of action, its grounds of hope are too fugitive and unsteady, to furnish any durable or domineering influence upon the course of life. Avarice again is so repulsive to the native nobility of the human heart, that it rarely obtains the dignity of a passion: great energy of character is requisite to form a consistent and accomplished miser: and of the mass of men it may be said--that, if the beneficence of nature has in some measure raised them _above_ avarice by the necessity of those social instincts which she has impressed upon their hearts, in some measure also they sink _below_ it by their deficiencies in that austerity of self-denial and that savage strength of will which are indispensable qualifications for the _role_ of heroic miser. A perfect miser in fact is a great man, and therefore a very rare one. Take away then the two forces of Ambition and Avarice,--what remains even to the male sex as a capital and overruling influence in life, except the much nobler force of Love? History confirms this view: the self-devotions and the voluntary martyrdoms of all other passions collectively have been few by comparison with those which have been offered at the altar of Love. If society should ever make any great advance, and man as a species grow conspicuously nobler, Love also will grow nobler; and a passion, which at present is possible in any elevated form for one perhaps in a hundred, will then be coextensive with the human heart.